Clear a Free Poker Bonus Without Spending Your Deposit

If you are at all familiar with the way online poker sites work their promotions, you already know that a free poker bonus can only be cleared by earning real poker points in real cash games and tournaments. A real money deposit is required to even initiate the bonus, however, it is possible to clear that bonus cash without ever spending any of the money you deposited into your online gambling account.

The only types of tournaments you can enter for nothing are outright freerolls. A freeroll tournament is a tournament in which everyone can play, with no entry fee, and some sort of reward at the end. A lot of poker sites will offer open-entry freerolls, but will set a prize of poker/tournament points, rather than real cash.

The bad news is, the points awarded in this type of poker freeroll are not the same points you need to collect in order to clear the bonus. The good news is, those same points can be used to enter standard tournaments that grant the actual player points you are seeking for that bonus, and will often have a real cash prize at the end of the road as well.

The idea is to play in a few points freerolls long enough to earn the tournament points necessary to play in a standard tournament. In this fashion, you can slowly but surely build up those necessary points to clear the free bonus, without ever touching the money you deposited into your online gambling account. It could take a while, depending on your skill level and the intensity of the competition, but it is more than possible.

Aside from that initial deposit, which we do not intend to spend, the goal is to earn those bonus dollars with no deposit. Bonus hunters world wide can appreciate the genius behind this plan. The real question is, can they pull it off?

Strategy

It’s hard to offer a solid strategy for this type of gameplay. Freeroll tournaments are notorious for having a high field of what we in the business call “maniac” poker players. A maniac is unpredictable by nature, making it impossible to read them. They may play conservatively on pocket Aces, then turn around and go all-in on a terrible hand at the very next deal of the cards.

The best advice for playing a field of maniacs in a freeroll tournament is to simply lay low until the majority of these loose cannons have weeded themselves out. Those who build a decent size chip stack will usually change their tactics, making them a little easier to read as the tournament rolls on. If you can survive the first waves of, “Hey, let’s all push our stack in on every hand and see what happens!”, you can often make your way into a prize-pulling position before it’s all over.

Another strategy would be to become a maniac yourself. Push those chips on the first few hands and if things don’t work out, try again in the next tournament. This isn’t the recommended technique, but it can work out every so often. Just be sure to tighten up your game once you get a decent stack going.

Before you know it, you will be playing poker online, gambling for real money on the poker site’s dime thanks to a simple free promotion and a risk-free deposit.